Japan's Total Empire Summary

279 Words2 Pages
The main focus of the book “Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism” is how the creation of Manchukuo contributed to shape the culture and a new type of imperialism in Japan from 1931 to 1941. Young calls the Japanese imperialism as “total empire” to describe the empire that has “the mass and multidimensional mobilization of domestic society” (13). Scholars often talk about how the state controlled people and those people were not responsible for the Japanese imperialism (9). However, Young describes state-society relations “the state wields power in its ordering of society, while society exercises power in its shaping of the state” (8) and argues that people were also deeply involved in the process of creating